Python and GD3 progress

(New thing: the SPIDriver Expert Pack is now in the Excamera Labs store. This is a SPIDriver plus three adapters to make a complete SPI toolkit. The SPI/Arduino (green board here) is what I'm using in this week's update.)
This week I've continued to tinker with CircuitPython and the Gameduino 3X. It's running on an Adafruit Metro M4 Express, which runs CircuitPython right out of the box. All I had to do was hook up its SPI interface and copy files into its virtual folder. Compared with almost any other embedded development tool, it's really quite painless.

So I aimed to get a simple animation running, just to see if CircuitPython could support some easy stuff.

First the graphics. Starting with the project logo, I cut out these two elements and saved them as transparent .png files. I copied them onto the MicroPython's shared drive.

Then a few lines of Python to load the sprites and run a simple animation. It draws the Blinka sprite ten times in a circle.

Quite a few people have asked about this combination - there seems to be a lot of interest in Python with the EVE 8xx series GPUs. Here are some notes on how it's working out.

• the complete source code is is about 900 lines of Python. I haven't run out of code space yet
• I have experimented a little with optimization in Python. A few tweaks to the low-level library sped this up from 20 to 30 fps
• as I've been developing, any errors produce proper Python stack traces. This is nice. I keep a serial terminal connected to the board to watch for errors and any print() output. It's amazingly close to writing Python on a PC
• The code for the animation is here - it's a little rough at the moment

Finally here's a digital capture of the animation running. Thanks for reading.